Writers: Mikhail Bushkov and Nastia Korkia
Director: Nastia Korkia
Nothing much happens in Nastia Korkia’s elegant portrait of a Russian childhood. However, the film’s long shots of summer life in a village are hypnotic, drawing the viewer into eight-year-old Katya’s holiday with her grandparents. While intentionally oblique, there’s still the sense that this will be Katya’s last summer of innocence.
Set at the time of the outbreak of the Chechen War, the film begins with a car journey. Katya, sitting in the back, sticks a mirror out of the window, and she follows its reflection as it travels joltingly behind her. The car is stopped at a checkpoint; but it’s only by a pair of boys pretending to be soldiers. They ask Katya’s grandfather if he’s bringing in any explosives or ammunition in a kind of war game that was captured so effectively by artist Francis Alŷs in Ricochets last year at the Barbican Art Gallery.
Radio announcers mention the preparations for the war alongside events celebrating the upcoming Harvest Festival. Fighter planes roar across the sky, and in one scene, created, alas, with CGI, a freight train carrying tanks thunders past Katya and her friends playing football. Otherwise, days are filled with bike rides across the flat, dull landscape.
A smaller conflict is played out between her grandparents, who, after many years, are filing for divorce. Katya accompanies her grandfather to a sleepy municipal building where bureaucracy is slow and impolite. He must wait longer for the divorce to be finalised. Her grandmother remains icily impassive at home.
Most of Korkia’s shots are from stationary cameras, usually of empty countryside, until from the right or the left comes a plane, a train or a huddle of bikes, only to leave the frame from the other side. These long takes give the impression that the summer is a long, unchanging one, but it’s doubtful Katya will come back. Her grandparents’ house will soon be on the market, and her childhood is now spoiled by something she spies near the gigantic overflow pipe that scars the landscape like a futuristic spaceship.
Korkia, who previously made documentaries, encapsulates a strange kind of nostalgia where skies are dark with portents of change. Although filmed in Serbia, Korkia feels that she has managed to replicate the Russia of her youth. But the memories in Short Summer are as sharp and painful as fragments of a broken mirror.
Short Summer is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
